Development of A Smart Box Prototype for Mail and Parcel Posts Using IoT and Solar Energy

During the era of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), online shopping has been growing and the traffic of parcel posts has also increased. However, recipients cannot always be on standby at home to receive their parcels. Therefore, a smart box prototype has been developed to receive parcel posts from the postal service. For sustainable development purposes, this system combines IoT and solar energy technologies to provide services to a recipient. One of the key features of this system is sending notifications or alerts to a recipient via a mobile application called LINE Notify when mail or parcel posts are dropped into the box. After testing the box using various kinds of mail envelopes for 50 time and various kinds parcels for 50 times, it was found that the average performance was 96%. The box received an overall evaluation score is $4.35\pm 0.50$ from system evaluation by 10 subjects. One problem detected in this system was an error detecting small sized parcels. This issue can be improved in the next version by adding additional sensors.